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Hi, I haven't done much downloading from the newsgroups since 2011, back then I was struggling along with Newsleecher 4.x and Forte Agent. Currently I have only a small block account with one provider, I am thinking of getting an account with a high-retention provider with 3500+ days of binary retention. I prefer downloading headers and browsing the groups over doing searches and working with NZB files.

I am wondering how big the resulting Newsbin database file would be if I started from scratch, then downloaded all headers from a group, say a.b.sounds.lossless, from one of the providers with 3500+ days of retention. Does anyone download all headers and browse the groups anymore?

Also, if my PC lost its Internet connection or crashed, would Newsbin, upon re-connect or re-launch, be able to resume downloading headers from where the interruption occurred? How "robust" is the Newsbin mechanism for header downloads when recovering from errors? Thanks

My PC rarely crashes/bluescreens, the latest one was a few weeks ago and related the the ESET antivirus I use. A couple more happened 1-2 years ago and were driver-related, but just updating the drivers caused them to go away.

OK thanks for running that test, I appreciate it. I am living in a house with a Comcast cable modem, I am capped at 1024 GB per month, so the 50 GB of headers for that group is a bit disappointing, but initially I think I'll grab only the oldest (500 days or so) headers from all the groups I am interested in (lossless music and a.b.dvd.*) then grab the oldest posts, to catch up. Actually I've been using my block account and some free trial accounts to grab some binaries from a.b.dvd.music that are ~3500 days old, I wanted them years ago, but back then I didn't have the disk space to grab them.

My PC may not be up to snuff, it is a Win7 Haswell system I built in 2014. Has several TB of free disk space (spinning HD's as JBOD, no NAS) - currently no SSD but I've just ordered a new Samsung 970 EVO SSD that will arrive tomorrow. It's only the 250 GB model though, I will install a fresh Win7 onto it, then start playing with Newsbin and whichever long-retention provider I choose. The group a.b.sounds.lossless is only 2.3 GB, so hopefully I can keep all the Newsbin group databases on the SSD, and initially download binaries onto the SSD, and later move completed downloads to the slower storage.

The weak link is the low RAM - the PC has only 8 GB of RAM - will that be enough when pulling 140 million headers or more?